 This page is an archive from the previous version of The Row Boat, which is why it doesn't look and work the same as the current version. However, these archives are fully functional and integrated with the new system.
Why does this site permit advertising?
Powered by Little Logger |
The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Statement on Total Outpouring and Limits3/09/2007 14:44:55This is a first attempt at something I've been thinking I need to figure out how to say for a long time. In one way or another it seems to be something every person needs to say, learn how to say, or imply, or at least presume from others. It is implicit in the fact of subjectivity and the paradox of language. The root of the problem is: it is impossible to say everything, and even if I did, why should anyone bother to listen. I suppose it comes from the sense that Hannah Arendt raises in The Human Condition, that all action is a reenactment of birth, a response to birth, an imitation of birth, and a re-birth. A creation of oneself. And yet, at the same time, an expression of oneself. It is the (partly mistaken) sense that I am only what I am able to get around to doing and saying, or sharing in a way such that I am read like a text (text in the broader sense of the French). When I produce something like an article or a book or a drawing or a conversation, there is always the instinct in me that wants to put a preface like this on the front: "This is not everything, this is only what I could do, an approximation of the truth." I want to get on my knees in tears and beg my friends and strangers to remember that, to read me charitably at least, that my intentions want to want to be good: I am, like you are, infinitely more than I appear. This, roughly is the sense of the dream of Total Outpouring, and this is the sense of its Limits. Sometimes it seems strange that books are so absurdly long, that they take so long to read. Particularly since, after reading it, the points I remember can usually be enumerated on less than a page. Particularly since writing books is part of the ritual of the line of work I'm in. To get a job I'll have to write one of those things whether I have that much to say or not. But it occurred to me once at an anarchist book fair that books are more than economical collections of points of fact. They are many things, but among them, a book is an immersion, a mystical bath approaching erotic. You do not read all 376 pages for 376 facts but for the fluency and the logic and the personality that those facts reside in. And this is why libraries can feel so holy. All the thousands of books are thousands of statements like this: Whether my statement be correct or in error, I want to immerse you in me. Since most writers love reading also, they mean also (and I mean to): I do this in thanksgiving for your immersing me in so many of you. Sometimes (like the other day), the dream of Total Outpouring strikes me and I tremble and don't know where to begin and where to pick up the pieces of what I have made myself into so far. And I am overcome by a sense of the Limits. This is because of an error: the error that Total Outpouring is a process only of the solitary person, that it is my responsibility alone. Good reading, I believe more and more, is discovering in an author the dream of Total Outpouring. What does she want to immerse me in. What in her does she know, or want to build in herself, and so much so that she needs my help, my reading to do it? Outpouring (we discover it can never be Total), like giving birth, does not happen alone. It takes intimacy, erotics, pain, craving hunger, and the guiding hand of people who've tried it before. Like being born, though, no instance of it is quite like any other, and it is something we must each learn to do it utterly blind and naked, from the beginning, as if it has not been done already billion times before.
re:Statement on Total Outpouring and Limits - 3/09/2007 14:46:40
|
|
| |
